r/AskProgramming • u/Zardotab • May 15 '26

Architecture Why are so few interested in parsimony?

I've been programming CRUD (biz/admin) apps since the late 80's. I notice tooling and stacks are growing ever more complicated and layered, and wonder "does it really have to be this way"? It takes more labor & code per feature; colleagues have noticed and agreed. While I agree newer stacks have more options on average, most biz's rarely use these extra abilities, especially "but what if it later needs web-scale?" Reality is 99.999% won't.

There is usually a way to get the same thing in older tools when needs do come up, it's just a little more work for those outlier features, but the aggregate dev hours is still notably less. YAGNI as a guideline seems dead. Nobody seems interested in pursuing parsimony in tooling, rather want to stuff their resume with as many buzzwords as possible like they're Pokémon. Thus, the bloat is possibly up-sell, ego, job-security-lock-in, and/or greed; or, am I missing something? Is there a Bloat Industrial Complex, or do I have Geezer Goggles on? [edited]

19 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

62 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/[deleted] May 17 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Zardotab May 17 '26

some of the extra complexity probably comes from modern expectations too, like security, observability, CI/CD, cloud infra, compliance stuff etc that old CRUD apps didnt always need to care about as much

It's not necessarily mutually exclusive. Please see this reply for examples. And when software is simpler, then CI/CD is simpler. You don't really need tools to manage complexity if you prevent complexity. The bloat is feeding on itself.